Booktalk: When Violet visits her mom’s office on Take Your Child to Work Day (April 26th this year), she is very helpful.

Snippet: Sometimes the boss won’t say hello because he’ll be getting ready for a presentation–that’s like show-and-tell for grown-ups. You’re probably an expert at show-and-tell, so be sure to offer to help.
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Booktalk: Maggie is always full of questions. But a young maid in a fine lady’s house isn’t supposed to wonder so much, so one day Maggie is thrown out into the street with only a tiny heart-shaped locket for a keepsake. Who is the lady in the locket?

A little dog named Oliver is pushing his nose along an icy sidewalk searching for his lost mistress, or at least something to eat. No matter how hard he looks he can’t find either one, but he does see a girl with round blue eyes and a golden locket around her neck. The girl calls him “Lucky.”

Snippet: For once in his short life, Oliver was happy to be an ordinary mutt, with parts of many kinds of dogs all mixed together. The part of him that was bloodhound would help find Bertie. With one last look at the cozy house where he had been raised from a pup, Oliver headed into the wide open world.
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Booktalk: To keep her best friend, Navin, from being killed at the hands of vicious wood elves, Donna Underwood stole the elixir of life. Now she’s facing an alchemist tribunal while her mother lies dying, succumbing to the elven curse that shattered her mind. In desperation, Donna seeks an audience with Aliette, the fierce and manipulative Wood Queen, who offers a deal: if Donna can use her strange and burgeoning powers to help the wood elves, Aliette will free her mother from the curse. Along with Navin and Xan, the half-fey guy she’s falling for, Donna struggles to unlock the secrets of her iron tattoos in time to save her mother’s life. But some secrets are better left untold.

Snippet: And the crows; so many of them. A murder of crows? Circling around and around in an indigo sky, shedding oly feather that look like black petals.

Maybe I’m just having anxiety dreams ahead of the trial. Aunt Paige gets mad when I call it that–my trial–but isn’t that what it is?
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Booktalk: In Binky’s third adventure, our intrepid, sometimes accident-prone hero is shaken out of his routine when he’s forced to contend with Gracie, a dainty striped foster kitty who comes to live at Binky’s space station (aka his home at 42 Sentinel Parkway). Binky instantly resents the new arrival, whose cute face and perfect manners are downright annoying. Indeed, Gracie seems too perfect. So Binky decides to do some undercover investigating and discovers a shocking truth about the family guest. Soon Binky is thrust full-throttle into a situation that puts all his Space Cat skills to the ultimate test!

Snippet:
Why would his humans do this to him?
Another cat? Wasn’t he good enough for them?
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The March 2012 Carnival Of Children’s Literature is up!

Have you visited the March Carnival Of Children’s Literature
at the Just Children’s Books! yet? Hop over and say hello to Nichole!

Booktalk: On May 6, 1937, the giant German airship the Hindenburg exploded in a ball of fire as it attempted to land at Lakehurst Navel Base in New Jersey. Of the 93 people on board, a remarkable 62 survived, including Werner Franz, the ship’s 14-year-old cabin boy.

Snippet: As the Hindenburg‘s cabin boy, 14-year-old Werner had many chores to do for the officers and crew–setting tables, washing dishes, making beds, cleaning boots and uniforms. Much of the time, Werner lived and worked below deck.

Booktalk: Originally published in 2004, Attack of the Killer Video Book has become indispensable for budding filmmakers and video production classes. This updated edition has been revised to include new technology, with hot tips on digital cameras and editing; shooting on a phone or webcam; adding cool and safe special effects; and much more. Aspiring directors will discover tricks and techniques for becoming a camera sharpshooter; lighting like a pro; making awesome music videos; and using social networking sites to post and promote their movies.

Snippet:Let There Be Lighting:
Your camera can adjust to the color of light because it has an automatic light balance. That means it works to make white things look white, even if there’s yellowy light on them. Then all of the other colors shift, too.

BONUS! See inside the book!
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Booktalk: Lily’s mother has slowly been losing herself to multiple sclerosis. After traditional treatment fails, she uses bee sting therapy, administered by Lily, to alleviate her pain. Lily is trained as a veterinary assistant, so she can easily handle the treatments. What she can’t handle is what happens when the bee sting therapy fails and it becomes clear that her mom wants to die.

One beautiful spring day, Lily’s mother asks her for the most impossible thing of all—mercy. While navigating first love, friendship, and other normal worries faced by high school sophomores, Lily also has to choose: help her mom go, or cling to her fading life for all it’s worth.

Snippet:
I take the bees outside, unscrew the lid of the bee jar, and listen to their angry buzzing.
“I hate you,” I whisper.
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Booktalk: Rafe Khatchadorian has enough problems at home without throwing his first year of middle school into the mix. Luckily, he’s got an ace plan for the best year ever, if only he can pull it off: With his best friend Leonardo the Silent awarding him points, Rafe tries to break every rule in his school’s oppressive Code of Conduct.

Snippet: It feels as honest as the day is crummy that I begin this tale of total desperation and woe with me, my pukey sister, Georgia, and Leonardo the Silent sitting like rotting sardines in the back of a Hills Village Police Department cruiser.

The Busy Spring
by Carl Emerson (Author) and Cori Doerrfeld (Illustrator)
Emma and Owen visit Old Oak at the park in the spring. Science easy reader
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February 2012 Carnival Of Children’s Literature

Have you visited the February Carnival Of Children’s Literature
at the The Fourth Musketeer yet? You’re in for a treat!

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Literary Link

If you are worried about how your images are shared, you can keep your work off Pinterest (via @GalleyCat)
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Booktalk: Yetta, beautiful Yetta, manages to escape from the butcher’s shop. But now she is lost in Brooklyn—a strange place filled with rude rats and dangerous buses!

Snippet: Yetta, beautiful Yetta, will not be sold. She will not be soup. She will not be roasted chicken on a Friday night. She is free. She is in Brooklyn.
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Booktalk: Ten-year-old Gabe is excited to go to the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment, but then he meets his new stepbrother, Zack, who doesn’t like nerds. Now what? Gabe makes a chart to figure it out…

Snippet:
PROBLEM: Am I a nerd who only has nerdy adventures?
HYPOTHESIS: No.

THINGS I CAN TELL ZACK
(I am not a nerd.)
1. I am going to a sleepaway
camp for six weeks!

THINGS I CAN’T TELL ZACK
(I am a nerd.)
1. It is the Summer Center
for Gifted Enrichment.

Booktalk: Nothing unusual ever happened on the Tuckers farm. Until the day that peacock showed up…

Snippet: The hens were squawking and clucking and flapping their wings. “We do all the work around here. I’d like to see that peacock lay one single egg.”
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Booktalk: For years, 10-year-old Zelly Fried has tried to convince her parents to let her have a dog. After all, practically everyone in Vermont owns a dog, and it sure could go a long way helping Zelly fit in since moving there from Brooklyn. But when her eccentric grandfather Ace hatches a ridiculous plan involving a “practice dog” named OJ, Zelly’s not so sure how far she’s willing to go to win a dog of her own. Is Ace’s plan so crazy it just might work . . . or is it just plain crazy?

Snippet: The whole mess started with a note:

KID,

SEE ME IMMEDIATELY WHEN YOU GET THIS.
DO NOT SPEAK OF THIS TO ANYONE, NOT
EVEN YOUR PARENTS OR YOUR BROTHER.

I’m sorry to say that the carnival software we have been using since 2006 has stopped working. Please go to the carnival announcement post here and add your link to the comments. Margo, our February host, is now an editor on our carnival round up blog, so she will collect all of your links there and add them to this month’s carnival.

Booktalk: When sixteen year old Kaelyn lets her best friend leave for school without saying goodbye, she never dreams she might not ever see him again. But then a strange virus begins to sweep through her island community. As patients start dying, the government quarantines the island: no one can leave, and no one can come back.

Snippet:Sept 2
Leo,
While the ferry was carrying you to the mainland, I was on West Beach with Mackenzie and Rachel. Mackenzie had decided we should have one last summer swim before school starts tomorrow, but the breeze was so chilly, none of us ended up wanting to go in the water. So we just walked on the sand, talking and speculating about how junior year will go.
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